The Mystic and the Pain of Enlightenment

Interview with Angela Neustatter

The image of Eastern mystics has been much tarnished lately. Revelations of higher consciousness and spiritual utopias are less popular than revelations of arch-capitalism.

Take the obese teenager Guru Mahara-ji with his palace, jewels and teams of minions; the Korean Dr. Moon with an alleged tax free income of $200.000 a year on recruitment methods which have brought him before the courts.

Even the highly respectable Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has built up a highly profitable concern (with a little help from his friends, the Beatles) selling the world Transcendental Meditation.

And now amid all this controversy comes the inner revelations of an Indian teacher – Krishnamurti’s Notebook. Its author is the elder statesman of the business of consciousness raising.

He is 81 and has spent the past 45 years telling us to question how and what we are doing in order to make the world a less conflict-torn place. He does not advise the usual doctrine of the guru and writes off these pernicious people setting themselves up as leaders.

This has been the theme of his 14 books so far- The latest is a far more personal document. A seven-month excerpt from the daily diary he keeps in which he describes the acute physical pain he suffers as a result of attaining heightened consciousness: the times and ways in which it comes and the effect it has on his life.

FOR AN interviewer used to animated exchanges, he is not an easy subject. He sits quietly and answers questions so slowly he appears to have finished mid-sentence. Eventually he unwinds, leaning forward to touch my hand as he makes a point, laughing a good deal and telling the occasional absurd joke.

His books say repeatedly that he is not interested in offering the world a 'method' for attaining higher consciousness or in being a mentor. Why then has he published this new book?

“I wrote it as a diary while I was traveling. It was not intended as a private revealing document. I have a horror of that very personal sort of thing. My publisher was interested to put it into print and that was all right with me, but I did not write it for publication.

“I describe what I call the process -my sensation of being outside the ordinary world, of being completely at peace and removed from conflict. This happens only from time to time and clearly it is impossible to describe to anybody who has not experienced it. But I have attempted to put into words the actual pain and sensation which goes with the heightened consciousness- It is not intended in a romantic way: if you lead a certain type of disciplined, quiet life you release a kind of energy -that's a scientific fact -and this affects the non-mechanical part of your brain so that you enter into a new dimension. The physical organism is incapable of meeting it and so you get the pain.

“I’m not suggesting that everyone should try to attain this, but it may be of interest to some people who have followed my thoughts and ideas to know what happens on a more personal level" What he does suggest and indeed has spent the years writing and saying is that people should stop letting ambition, desire, competitiveness and fear dictate their actions.

These lead to inner conflict which in turn makes for unhappiness, discontent and violence. This may sound little different from the ideas of many who consider themselves members of the alternative society. But, says Krishnamurti, ”even the people who say they are practicing ‘alternatives” are no different I meet hundreds of young people going into communes. They say the world can’t be altered through bloody revolution and bureaucracy, what is needed is love and peace. Then what happens? The commune cracks open because of conflicting egos and ambitions.”

He became a world renowned figure. And although he liked the company of women and his life was busy, full and sociable, he never married and devoted his energy to being a totally self-sufficient being. At the same time he began to realize that by being a leader - which was the way things were going -he was not helping people to find a way to peace, but creating a different kind of conformity

"I don't believe in asceticism, rigid patterns of meditation or any kind of strict living code because it is all a form of dogma which is wrong.” he says, Of gurus, he notes: "They are saying they believe in the same sort of things I do but they want followers, big empires and power.”